Well, I managed to find a working version of 0.3.22 to run. It was meant for centOS, but seems to work on debian without a problem. I have yet to test RPC calls though.
The version I am using was downloaded from this post:
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=685.msg371171#msg371171Why is it such a problem to run bitcoind on Debian and so many other headless linux OS's? From what I have read, it seems like the dependencies are not something you can upgrade - it's part of the core OS. It seems silly to have such dependencies that exclude so many linux OS's from running bitcoin...
I could be wrong, and if I am, I would very much appreciate someone pointing out how it might be possible to run one of the later versions of bitcoind on debian.
What Debian release are you running? Squeeze, Wheezy, Sid?
From what I know of the Debian Way, Squeeze is stable due to the lack of "latest, greatest and cutting edge" - could be part of the problem?
Rock-solid Stable doesn't always mean "everything is going to work just fine"
As far as I know, the Boost libs are the only so-called "nonstandard" libraries that bitcoin depends on (I could be wrong).
have you tried building just the daemon (no gui, no Wx Widgets)?